Writing a good service / product / category page
Service / product / category pages should answer one question in a bunch of different ways:
"For this product / service / category specifically, why should the visitor choose your business over someone else?"
Need a quick lesson on avoiding waffle? Click here to watch my video on being concise.
To save me writing out that question over and over in this document, I'm just going to refer to it as The Why Question. I'm also going to refer to "product pages", but these might be pages for services or product categories too - the same approach works in all cases.
Your aim should be to answer The Why Question as comprehensively as you possibly can (after all, there's probably a whole bunch of reasons why they should choose you, right?) while also getting to the point efficiently so visitors don't have to work to find the specific answer to The Why Question which will convince them.
How I actually do this for clients
The last few builds I've done have had the same shape - solar panel companies, event hire firms, other businesses with service areas - and the process is generally the same. I'll set up monitoring for the search results using SERP Dino, which tracks lots of keywords and scans for their positions. It's got a little bit of jankiness, but the results are pretty good, and if I look at overall trends, then I can see for a certain service area which terms aren't ranking well.
For each of those pages, I look at the existing content on the site and see how well it addresses it. It might well be that there's just a few things that need fixing up - the page might be an exact duplicate of another page on the site, or it might have some obvious breakage on it. But probably, they're not specifically targeting that service and town at all, in a deliberate way, with a page.
So then I'll make a page on their site, in a nice tiered, hierarchical way - at something like /locations/their-town (there's a guide about structuring your site for the hierarchy bit). And on that page I compile as much data as I possibly can about how that business works in that service area.
That data has to come from the business, and this has been the hardest part, because it's very hard to get people to give me information about the inner workings of their business. What works the best is if you can just give me access to some sort of booking database, or client diary, or an export of that - with locations, and venues, and postcodes, or anything like that. Whatever you can give me that gives me some sort of suitable context about the business - real data - and then I can do the research myself, and find out where it is in that area that you work, and how your business operates there. And then the stuff on the page will be things that address those actual points.
How much of this I do depends on how much the customer's paying me, as well. If they're doing an audit and they've got hundreds of pages, I can't give an analysis of hundreds of pages for £200 because it's very time consuming. So I'll scan an appropriate selection of pages, see where they stand, find where the worst ones are, and we'll come up with replacement content for that site - frozen around targeting a member of the public who's just landed on the site and doesn't know anything about the business, so it captures the EEAT metrics straight off the bat and sells the visitor on your business immediately.
I've had loads of success with this method. I do the same treatment on my own Chobble sites, except I'm very rubbish at getting round to it, as with all of the marketing for Chobble - but I do see results for it when I work through the same process on my own side, too.
Types of mistake
When product pages don't answer The Why Question effectively, it's usually because they're either:
- Too brief with barely any content.
- Huge with walls of text that would take ages to read.
- Keyword-stuffed and obscure the answer.
- AI-generated generic text that could describe any business, not yours specifically.
- ChatGPT'd the whole site - loads and loads of pages, and very little information on any of them.
Let's dig into each of those a bit:
Problem #1: Too-brief pages
If a friend asked you to tell them about one of your products, I wager you'd be able to talk about it at some length - how your business deals with it, what questions come up regularly, what kind of clients you'd like to attract for it, why you're a good choice of provider for it, and so on. You would have no problem answering The Why Question, because you (presumably!) take pride in knowing all about it and providing a quality service.
By missing this information from your product pages you're forcing the visitor to either search around on the site for it, get in touch with you to ask questions, or - worst of all - just go somewhere else where that information is readily available.
Problem #2: Huge pages
You might be tempted to address every single question the customer might have on the page, ending up with a really long page of text which would take minutes for a visitor to read. Many of these questions won't be specific to the product you're discussing - for example, you might list every single service area you cover.
Pages like this can overwhelm the visitor and bury the key bit of information they're looking for to convince them to choose you.
The opposite version of this mistake turns up a lot on service area pages: someone tried to put something useful in, but it's phrased as one huge big block of text that has useful data buried in it, and it isn't scannable in any way - no sub-headers, it doesn't directly get to any points, and there's no call to action anywhere. The information's in there, but a member of the public has to work to dig it out, and most of them won't.
You can break these pages up with sub-headings (which I'll discuss later), but you may also want to move the more "general" information to dedicated pages, and link to those pages with a quick summary from your product pages instead.
This means that a paragraph like:
"We hire widgets in Altrincham (£20), Blackley (free), Bolton (£20), Broughton (free), Cheetham Hill (free), Clifton (free), Crumpsall (free), Denton (£10), Droylsden (£10), Heaton Park (free), Middleton (free), Prestwich (free), Radcliffe (free), Ramsbottom (£10), Sale (£20), Salford (free), Simister (free), Swinton (£10), Unsworth (free), Westhoughton (£20), Whitefield (free), etc etc etc"
Can become the much easier to understand:
"We hire widgets anywhere within 20 miles of our Prestwich base, with free delivery within 10 miles. [Click here for our full list of delivery areas and prices].
Problem #3: Keyword-stuffed pages
Keyword stuffed pages use the same words or phrases too often. This is done in an attempt to boost search rankings, but it makes the text sound unnatural and obscures the answers to The Why Question.
Neither search engines or your potential customers like this practice - it was an effective search engine technique back in 2010, but nowadays Google doesn't analyse how many times a keyword appears on your page. Instead, they look for evidence that your page addresses the customer's "intent", and for product pages that means evidence that it answers The Why Question.
There's a guide all about "Keywords & Keyword Stuffing" in the guides section.
Problem #4: AI waffle
When using AI to help write your pages, it's important to remember that AI will never create new information. They work by scraping the internet for existing information, and then re-formatting it to answer your prompts.
This means that AI chatbots can sometimes use a lot of words to say very little. The text often uses vague, cliched, or generic phrases that do not help the reader answer The Why Question. They tend towards writing in American English, with different spelling and word choices than we use in the UK.
This means you cannot rely on AI to answer The Why Question succinctly without spending some time providing it with the answers to the question. You should also aim to spend at least 10x as much time tweaking the AI response to suit your business as you spent prompting it. You should use AI as a writing partner or editor, and keep the authorship for yourself.
Rather than prompting AI with "write a page about widget hire", instead you might want to prompt with something like:
"I am writing a page on my website about widget hire in Prestwich. I want to emphasise the reasons someone should choose my business for their widget hire needs. I have been hiring widgets for 15 years. I am WDGT-qualified and my widgets are examined every two years by a WIDJ-qualified inspector. I have a 9.9/10 rating on the Checkawidget website. I have over 150 reviews on my Google Business listing, with a 4.8 rating. I am based in Prestwich and deliver within 20 miles. Use British English in your response."
Or even better - write the page yourself first, and then pass it onto the AI with a prompt like:
"Here is a page I wrote about widget hire in Prestwich. Tell me if I have missed any important information, or could write things in a more concise way. Tell me if there are any spelling or grammatical mistakes, or if any sentences are hard to read."
When a customer tells me they use ChatGPT and it's well written, I don't normally push back against them, because the reality is that it is well written - the formatting and the punctuation and stuff are right. But what I normally say to them is about this information density: that if it could describe any business, then it's probably not specific enough to rank well. It needs to be very specific to your business.
Check out the guide about using AI effectively in the guides section.
Problem #5: ChatGPT'd the whole site to death
The problem is that people generally have ChatGPT'd their site to death. So the site has loads and loads of pages on it, and all of the pages have very little information on them. And this is hard to undo, because Google has then - by the time that someone's replaced the old content on the site - got a picture in its head of what their site is like, and it's generally this low information density site. So, that takes unpicking, because we then need to rewrite basically everything, and they've probably got loads of pages that they don't want to delete, because they've convinced themselves that it has some value - and it does, some minor value - but it would be much nicer, really, to start over from scratch with well-written pages that address searcher intent and sell the business well from the start.
The combination problem
And the other thing I find a lot, actually, is that these pages - when they exist at all - are thought of as two distinct things: there's a bit of text, that's boilerplate, that's on all the pages, that's about the service; and there's another bit of text, that's boilerplate, that's about the town; and there's nothing about the combination of those two. The town chunk has the name swapped and some random facts in about the town - that it's got a nice town hall, and that it was known for its cotton industry or whatever. But that's not anything specific about their industry - it doesn't matter, it's irrelevant data.
What actually addresses the intent is the combination of the two: when we've been in this town before, here's the kind of venues and events that we do, and here's the people that we've worked with. It'll actually be useful for someone to use - they'll see things that they recognise, and they'll know that it's not bullshit, because they'll recognise that those are real businesses that they know. They can even, if they want, get in touch with the business and say, did you hire this company? Text that could describe any business, or any town, doesn't do that job.
Personality
Given all of the above, you might be tempted to write your pages in the most hyper-efficient way possible with no filler or cruft, just straight facts. While this might work well for some "business to business" industries, if you're dealing with the general public then your personality matters - it's one of the factors that make up part of The Why Question.
You don't have to go overboard with this - don't feel obliged to write in a heavy regional dialect, or to squeeze jokes in, or write anything overly-personal, but if you want your text to sound friendly you may want to write as though you are speaking the words, by doing things like:
Use less formal phrases and simple language. Rather than saying "Our team strives to ensure your complete satisfaction when hiring our widgets", you might say "We want you to be totally happy with our widget hire service".
Include anecdotes when relevant. You might mention your personal experiences or preferences, or those of your friends and family. For example, you could say "This widget was the star attraction at my son's 4th birthday party", or "This widget is our team's favourite - they love seeing the reactions on customers' faces when we set it to max speed".
Use contractions. Tweaks as simple as writing "that's" for "that is" can make a big difference to how formal and natural your content sounds. Compare "That is why we are sure we are the best" to "That's why we're sure we're the best".
Breaking text up
Many visitors won't read all of the text on a page. Instead, they'll scan the text to try and find the specific answer to The Why Question they need. You can make this process easier by breaking the text up and making it more visually interesting, by doing things like:
Using sub-headers. You can split the text up into logical sections using H2 header tags. For example, if your text contains a bunch of points to do with safety, it would be worth putting these under a "Safety" header. Doing this would mean that searchers who are mostly interested in your safety credentials can easily spot that header and jump straight to the bit they care about.
Using formatting. You may notice that this document has some key bits in bold, with the occasional use of italics for emphasis and quotes. It also includes links to other places - like my docs on keywords or AI. Adding features like this to your text can make it easier to read by highlighting the important words, or by indicating chunks of text as quotations.
Examples
Given all of the above, here's an example product page for my widget hire category. The text in [square brackets] would link through to more specific pages:
Widget Hire in North Manchester
Need to hire a widget? With 15 years of experience, WDGT certification, and hundreds of five-star reviews, we're North Manchester's most trusted widget hire specialists.
Why Choose Our Widgets?
Our widgets are UK manufactured and safety-tested every 2 years by WIDJ-certified inspectors. We offer free delivery within 10 miles of Prestwich, 7 days a week - including bank holidays! If you're in a pinch you can use our emergency 4-hour delivery.
Our Widget Range
We stock over 20 different widgets to suit every occasion. You can click through to each widget below, but our most popular options are:
Our [party widget], perfect for birthdays and celebrations. It's our most-hired widget and is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser! It's available in multiple sizes to suit your space.
Our heavy-duty [industrial widget], designed for construction and manufacturing jobs. It comes with full safety documentation and on-site training.
Our lightweight [portable widget], ideal for small spaces or where power supply is limited. This was a huge hit at last year's "Festwich" Festival!
What Our Customers Say
We maintain a 4.8/5 rating on Google from over 150 reviews. Here's what recent customers had to say about our widget hire:
"Fantastic service, widget arrived exactly when promised. Will definitely use again!" - Sarah P, Whitefield
"The team really knows their widgets. They helped me choose the perfect one for my event" - Mike R, Bury
Delivery Areas
We deliver to all areas within 20 miles of our Prestwich base, including free delivery to Whitefield, Radcliffe, and other nearby areas. [See our full delivery area and pricing] (link to delivery areas page)
Get in Touch
Ready to hire a widget? Give us a call on 0161 123 4567 or use our [online booking form]. We're usually able to confirm availability that same working day.
All widget hires come with £10m Public Liability Insurance and call-out support between 9am and 10pm
Explaining the example
The example above tries to answer The Why Question in its opening paragraph - "you should choose us because we're experienced, we have relevant qualifications, and customers love us".
If the customer's Why Question is more about the specifics of widget hire, the second section addresses this - "our widgets are UK-manufactured, safe, and available for hire all year"
The text is broken up with H2 sub-headings into clearly defined sections, making it easy to scan. It uses a friendly, conversational tone, and backs up its claims with proof, in the form of reviews from real customers. It includes lots of specific details about the business, with no filler text, and includes an anecdote about hiring to the "Festwich" Festival.
Conclusion
I hope the above gives you plenty to think about when writing your product, category, or services pages. To wrap this up, I think it's worth repeating The Why Question again. You should keep this question in mind throughout your work on these types of pages. Repeat it like a mantra in your head - it should be your guiding light.
"For this product / service / category specifically, why should the visitor choose your business over someone else?"
If you want help writing service pages that convert visitors into customers, send me a message through the form below.